Optimize DSL for OLDER hardware and lower memory

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Optimize DSL for OLDER hardware and lower memory
started by: JLA

Posted by JLA on Mar. 02 2009,19:31

Just trying to find out how to optimize DSL for some older hardware and lower memory. Let me give you the situation.

Had a machine with an AMD K6-2 380Mhz Processor w/3d Now Technology - 192MB of RAM, 10GB Hard Drive and PCI Nvidia Video Card with 32MB onboard Video memory.

Did a full HD install on the machine as follows

HDA1 - 400MB Swap File
HDA2 - ext2 partition for DSL

ACPI, APM and DMA turned on - no problems

System booted fine and all smaller apps ran well. Installed XFREE86 with the Nvidia Ready config file and all was well.

Problem was with firefox or Opera 8.5DSL, webpages still a bit too slow to render. Installed the Adobe Flash player 7 on both firefox and Opera and Youtube videos a bit slow to play.

How could this system be optimized further in regards to browsing the web so this function was inline and as fast as other apps on the OS?

Thanks in advance

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 03 2009,03:44

You're not going to be able to do much to optimize for youtube. Flash is rather bulky itself, and the videos need a decent processor to play them.

The only thing I can suggest that will improve performance of DSL mor ethan it is (which is already as streamlined a desktop distro as you're going to find) is to change your desktop to something even lighter than jwm and disable dfm.

Posted by u2musicmike on Mar. 03 2009,17:27

I have the same issues with flash video as I have a laptop that is only 200 MHz. I installed the Firefox plug-in for flash video download and it works good with youtube. I then use Xine to watch the videos. Old hardware has it limitations.

Posted by JLA on Mar. 03 2009,17:49

Yes, it seems that with DSL 4X version that attempting to do this on lower end hardware is a hit or miss.

There has to be someway to optimize the OS to enable smooth flash video playing as the rest of the OS runs very smoothly and without significant delay.

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 03 2009,19:58

Yes, the OS runs smoothly because it was designed to work that way on older hardware. Flash is not designed that way. Video in general isn't really all that great with processors slower than around 300-400mhz, but it's made much worse when you combine them with Flash (which is in turn running within a semi-heavy web browser). The OS is not the issue here...it is almost entirely a limit of the speed of your processor. As a former Flash developer (before the days of flv), I'd seen over and over again how demanding Flash is on processors, and each new release increases its hunger. Your best option is to take u2musicmike's advice to download the video data rather than play it in the browser.